Donna and I had been paling around for a few months, watching movies at the base theater, going out for meals, etc. But for the Fourth of July weekend we planned a getaway trip to Pennsylvania to stay with Bob Brown, my old Class Leader at ‘B’ School, back in Millington, TN who was then stationed at Willow Grove. Bob and his wife Joanne had two teenaged daughters, so I slept on the couch and Donna bunked in with the girls.
I want to say it was on Saturday that all of us went out to see a movie. They have theorized that if you want to put your arm around a girl you would like to get closer to, just take her to a scary movie. That theorem proved true that day, because the movie we saw was Jaws. When Richard Dreyfuss’ character went down underwater to check on the boat he and Roy Scheider find and that dead guy’s head popped out, BINGO, she grabbed my hand.
We both credit seeing this movie with cementing what was to become an almost 50 year long love affair. We might have watched it a couple of times over the years, but it never was an annual thing. So today, it being the 50th anniversary and all, I rewatched it. I did kind of miss that hand though.
Oh, on a side note, a dozen years later we both ended up working at the place that supplied the solenoid valves that operated the shark’s jaws, Automatic Switch Co.